St. Kilda

St. Kilda on The Modern Antiquarian, the UK & Ireland's most popular megalithic community website. 1 news item, 1 piece of folklore, 2 weblinks, plus information on many more ancient sites nearby and across the UK & Ireland.

Folklore

Apparently the native people of St Kilda had developed a genetically inherited elongated big toe that let the men cling more easily to the cracks in the rocks. On one side of the island is the Mistress Stone where marriageable men had to balance on one leg - on the edge of a 300 ft drop - to prove their agility on the rocks and their ability to support a family.

Links

Nearly a century ago, the last 36 residents were evacuated from the most remote part of the British Isles, St Kilda, an isolated archipelago off the beautiful and rugged western coast of Scotland.

After 86 years, the music of St Kilda has been discovered, recorded in a Scottish care home by Trevor Morrison, an elderly man who was taught piano by an inhabitant of St Kilda. Heard by the outside world for the first time these haunting melodies offer a last link to the so-called 'island on the edge of the world'.

Latest posts for St. Kilda

An old story told in previous centuries by the indigenous folk of Hirta (St. Kilda) described a long-lost well that was thought to be an abode of the little people, known as the Well of Eternal Youth. Not to be confused with the Well of Virtues near the Amazon’s House less than a mile west, the rough whereabouts of this site is cited by J. Sands (1878) in the folklore section of his otherwise historical account on these faraway Atlantic islands. He wrote:

“Once on a time an old fellow, in going up Connagher with a sheep on his back, observed a Well which he had never seen or heard of before. The water looked like cream, and was so tempting, that he knelt down and took a hearty drink. To his surprise all the infirmities of age immediately left him, and all the vigour and activity of youth returned. He laid down the sheep to mark the spot, and ran down the hill to tell his neighbours. But when he came up again neither sheep nor well were to be found, nor has any one been able to find the Tobair na h-oige to this day. Some say that if he had left a small bit of iron at the well—a brog with a tacket in it would have done quite well—the fairies would have been unable to take back their gift.”

A group of tourists explore the 'Mistress Stone' at Ruiaval. More than 250 years earlier, Martin, described how 'every Bachelor-Wooer is by ancient Custom obliged in Honour to give a specimen of his Affection for the Love of his Mistress'.

By bowing out from the rock over the cliff while standing on one foot, the suitor was 'accounted worthy of the finest Mistress in the World'.

Macaulay, in his "History of St. Kilda" published in 1764, describes a spring there called by the inhabitants Toberi-Clerich, the cleric in question being, according to him, Columba. "This welI," he says, "is below the village, . . . and gushes out like a torrent from the face of a rock. At every full tide the sea overflows it, but how soon that ebbs away, nothing can be fresher or sweeter than the water. It was natural enough for the St. Kildians to imagine that so extraordinary a phenomenon must have been the effect of some supernatural cause, and one of their teachers would have probably assured them that Columba, the great saint of their island and a mighty worker of miracles, had destroyed the influence which, according to the established laws of nature, the sea should have had on that water," This spring resembles one in the parish of Tain, in Ross-shire, known as St. Mary's Well. The latter is covered several hours each day by the sea, but when the tide retires its fresh, sweet water gushes forth again.